Tonight, the postseason kicks off with the Yankees hosting the Twins in the AL Wild Card game. And there may not be another game this year where one team is as strongly favored to win as New York is today. Our Game Odds have the Yankees as 67/33 favorites, FiveThirtyEight has it 63/37 for the Yankees, and depending on the sports book you’re looking at, the Yankees might be as high as 70% favorites to win tonight.

It’s not too hard to see why the odds are so slanted in New York’s favor. For one, they’re pretty clearly the better team. Their 91-71 record might only be six games better than Minnesota’s, but their BaseRuns expected record of 102-60 was actually the second-best in baseball, and 21 wins better than the Twins 81-81 expected record.

And the advantage is only amplified by eliminating the depth pieces in a winner-take-all affair. Luis Severino (2.98 ERA/3.07 FIP/3.04 xFIP) is a significantly better pitcher than Ervin Santana (3.28 ERA/4.46 FIP/4.77 xFIP), and the gap will only grow once the bullpens get involved; the Yankees had the game’s best bullpen this year, while the Twins checked in at #22. With Chad Green, David Robertson, Tommy Kahnle, and Dellin Betances all around to bridge the gap to Aroldis Chapman, the Yankees can afford to get Severino out of the game at almost any point, rather than let him bury them with early struggles. The Twins, though, don’t have enough good arms to get through six or seven shutdown innings if Santana gets in trouble in the first few innings.

Toss in that the Twins won’t have their best hitter, Miguel Sano, even as a pinch-hitter, and well, the Yankees should be heavily favored tonight, especially given that they also have home field advantage. The fact that the Yankees have dominated the Twins over the last decade is irrelevant, but it’s still correct to think New York is in a significantly better position to win tonight than Minnesota is.

But this is baseball, and at the risk of relying on cliché, any team can beat any other team in a single-game matchup. The Twins might be underdogs, but they’re about as likely to win tonight as Jose Altuve is to get a base hit in any given at-bat, and no one is surprised when that happens. So, let’s look at how the Twins might have to do in order to pull off the upset.

These Twins aren’t the slap-hitters of years past; this team surged to the playoffs on the backs of a strong offense led by a bunch of guys hitting homers. And while Severino didn’t have a home run problem this year, it was his primary undoing the last two years, so it’s not impossible for the Twins to take him deep a couple of times before the bullpen arms can get warm. Hoping to string a bunch of singles together to put together a rally not only has a lower chance of success, but the time it takes to start that kind of rally also gives Joe Girardi a chance to get one of his army of relievers warm, so the Twins best chance to put up runs tonight is to score quickly. And that means home runs.

So forget everything you hear about bunting, small ball, and playing for one run tonight. The Twins need to put up five or six runs to have a real good chance to win tonight, and they’re probably not going to little-ball their way to that kind of total. The Twins’ best chance to win tonight is to hammer a couple of mistakes and hope that they can get some kinds on base before putting the ball in the seats.

While Santana was the team’s best starter this year, Berrios might be their x-factor tonight. On a staff full of pitch-to-contact types — they ranked 29th in K% — he’s the one guy who has legitimate swing-and-miss stuff. He didn’t blow hitters away as a starter, but given a few innings in a winner-take-all situation, his stuff might play up a few ticks, and if he’s sitting 95 and throwing his wipeout curveball, it’s not that hard to imagine him going all Andrew Miller on the Yankees for a few innings.

Using Berrios in relief tonight will put the Twins at a big disadvantage in the ALDS, given that they’d have burned their top two starters just to try and get there, but they don’t have any better options. If Santana has to hand the ball to Taylor Rogers or Tyler Duffey, things probably won’t go that well for the Twins. If they can go Santana and Berrios for the first seven innings, then hand the ball to Trevor Hildenberger and Matt Belisle, then they might be able to hold the Yankees to just a few runs. The Twins should be aggressive in trying to avoid a middle reliever fight, because that’s the one they are least equipped to win.

Gary Sanchez has one of the best arms in baseball, but he struggles to keep the ball in front of him on pitches that bounce; no catcher in baseball allowed more than the 69 wild pitches and passed balls he allowed this year. He also led the league in catcher throwing errors, so while his arm is very strong, it’s not always particularly accurate.

The Twins probably won’t get a lot of baserunners against New York, so they need to convert a high percentage of them the ones they do get into runs. So if they get guys on first base, and there is a pitch in the dirt, don’t be afraid to go. If they can steal a run or two through aggressive exploitation of Sanchez’s biggest weakness, then maybe they can also steal a game in which they are decided underdogs.

The 2017 regular season is officially in the books. We didn’t get any kind of dramatic finishes, with the No. 1 pick the only thing decided on the final day of the season; Pablo Sandoval remained a net negative for his employers by costing the Giants the top pick with his season-ending walk-off.

Despite the lack of pennant-race drama, however, this was still a pretty fun season, with a lot of spectacular individual performances and the emergence of a few true powerhouse teams. So, let’s take a look at a few players who helped define the 2017 season.

While Giancarlo Stanton captured the home-run title, Aaron Judge is the new face of what power looks like in baseball. He not only became the first rookie ever to hit 50 home runs, he was also arguably baseball’s best overall player this season; he was the only guy in the game to crack +8 WAR this season. Unlike the last time power spiked in MLB, this one is defined less by hulking one-dimensional designated hitters and more by the most freakish athletic specimens ever to play the game.

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Back in August, I wrote about the remarkably crowded NL MVP race. I went through 10 guys with pretty strong cases for the award, and noted there wasn’t much separation between those 10 guys. I ended the piece by noting that “this list will undoubtedly narrow itself”, figuring that down the stretch, a few guys would rise above the rest of the crop and become the clear top candidates.

Well, that didn’t happen. With just a few days left before NL MVP voters are required to turn in their ballots, the reality is that this is the most muddled class of MVP candidates I can ever remember.

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Chris Sale has obviously been the pitching story in Boston this year, as the team’s first-year ace surpassed expectations and stabilized a group that saw David Price miss most of the year and Rick Porcello go backwards once again. But in Sale’s shadows, Drew Pomeranz has also been quietly excellent, and is one of the main reasons the Red Sox are almost certainly going to win the AL East this week.

Among AL starters, Pomeranz ranks 5th in ERA-, 11th in FIP-, and 10th in xFIP-. His season line is a near identical match for that of Justin Verlander, for example. For all the heat Dave Dombrowski took for giving up Anderson Espinoza to acquire Pomeranz last summer, he’s been more than worth the price thus far.

But, of course, one of the reasons people weren’t thrilled about the trade is that Pomeranz hasn’t proven to be a durable starter, and there are always concerns about his health in the postseason, when the Red Sox need him most. And once again, as the calendar turns to fall, the Red Sox can’t be sure whether they can trust Pomeranz with the ball next week.

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The Rockies are struggling again. After winning eight of nine to re-solidify their lead in the race for the second Wild Card spot, they’ve now lost five of seven, including their last three in a row. Meanwhile, the surging Brewers have won nine of 12, closing Colorado’s lead to just a single game. Yesterday, they got shut out by Matt Moore, who has been one of the worst pitchers in baseball this year. The team’s inconsistent offense broke up for 16 runs last Saturday, but scored a grand total of 12 runs in the other five games they’ve played in the last week, and now the Brewers are nipping at their heels.

But if you look at our Playoff Odds, our algorithm still thinks the Rockies are in a pretty good spot, with a 68% chance of capturing the second Wild Card spot, versus just 16% for the Brewers. With just a one game lead, this is a pretty big discrepancy, and might seem like our projections are just wildly overrating the difference between the two teams. However, those calculations aren’t just accounting for the projected performance of the Brewers and Rockies over the next week and a half, but also taking both teams’ schedules into account. And the schedules for the two teams couldn’t be more different.

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For the last 15 years, Tom Tango — now senior database architect on MLB’s Statcast team — has hosted the Fans’ Scouting Report on his site, tapping into the wisdom of the crowd to create another data point to help in the evaluation of a player’s defensive performance each season. While we’ve hosted the results of the voting on FanGraphs the last few years, we’re excited to announce that we’ll now be hosting the voting for the project on the site, as well.

Using the link to the scouting report here, you will be able to provide your evaluation of the defenders on a specific team; this should be for the team you watch most frequently. Instead of providing an overall valuation of a player’s defensive contribution this year, you’ll be grading players on a series of individual skills, which will be tallied into a final overall rating. These ratings should be drawn from your own observation, and as best as you can manage, not be influenced by other defensive metrics you’ve seen for any particular player.

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Ten months ago, Jose Bautista hit the free-agent market. Even coming off a down year, he looked like one of the best hitters available. However, Bautista was caught up in the cratering market for bat-only sluggers and, after a few months of just moderate interest, eventually re-signed with the Blue Jays on a one-year deal.

Now, with that contract expiring in a few weeks, it looks quite possible that not only will Jose Bautista not be returning to Toronto next year, but we might be seeing the last few weeks of Bautista’s major-league career.

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On August 1st, our Playoff Odds gave the Twins a 3.6% chance of winning one of the two AL Wild Card spots. The team had briefly flirted with contending, acquiring Jaime Garcia from the Braves, but then they flipped him to the Yankees a week later when the team began to struggle. They also traded away closer Brandon Kintzler to the Nationals, acknowledging that the team’s strong first half was probably not going to end with a postseason berth.

But despite the front office’s rational evaluation of their team’s abilities, the Twins have actually gotten better in the second half, and with their strong play the last six weeks, have now put themselves in prime position to capture a Wild Card spot.

How have the Twins turned their season around after selling at the deadline? By finally not hitting like the Twins.

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